Academy to unveil unseen art treasures

A treasure-house of masterpieces of world art - many of them never seen in Britain before - will go on show in London at the Royal Academy this autumn in an event expected to rival the same gallery's Monet and Aztec exhibitions in popularity.

It will span 5,000 years of human creativity, from Etruscan terracotta figures to Picasso's bronze Woman Combing Her Hair. It is due to include six Gauguins, three Degas paintings, 13 Degas sculptures, two Monets, two Manets, three Corots and a Courbet.

The value of the exhibition's total of 230 works, details of which were announced yesterday, is so priceless that no museum could afford the insurance premiums. It has only been possible to organise because of indemnity agreements between governments.

To English eyes, its crowning glory and revelation may be Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Landscape with Figures, which has never been on show here and is little known even as an image.

Mary Anne Stevens, the academy's senior curator, said the large canvas, flaming with reds, blues and loamy browns, recalled the author Somerset Maugham's description of a Gauguin-like painting in his novel The Moon and Sixpence:

Another painting not previously on exhibition to the British public is one of the art world's most famous images, through prints and postcards, of the tragedy of addiction: Edouard Manet's The Absinthe Drinker. Also on show will be one of the few casts of Rodin's The Thinker to survive from the sculptor's lifetime.

But for Copenhagen's Glyptotek museum - which is lending the total of 230 works to the academy - the heart of the collection is its array of Etruscan, Greek and Roman objects, among them friezes of a grace reminiscent of the Elgin marbles. Virtually none have been shown outside Denmark before.

The loans agreement is possible because the Glyptotek, like the Royal Academy an independent museum, is partly closing for refurbishment. In return it is being lent five Constables by Britain.

The exhibition, Ancient Art to Post-Impressionism, will owe its existence doubly to Carlsberg. The Danish brewery are joint sponsors; and two of its dynasty amassed the paintings and sculptures at the core of the collection.